NATO and Europeans Plot Path Ahead By STEVEN ERLANGER Published: May 6, 2010 New York Times PARIS — An unusual online effort by NATO , the European Union , governments and research groups to ask a broader public for ideas on the future of Western security policy has produced a series of recommendations that call for NATO to develop a civilian arm and the European Union to create its own intelligence agency. The discussion, called the 2010 Online Security Jam, brought together some 3,800 people with expertise or interest in trans-Atlantic security issues from 124 countries, who logged in over five days in February for thematic conversations led by many senior officials and scholars in Europe, Russia, China and the United States. The recommendations, which will be released on Friday, will be presented in detail then to NATO’s secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen , and to Catherine Ashton , the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security. Both NATO and the European Union are preparing new guidelines for their future: NATO, a new strategic concept, and the union, a blueprint for 2020. NATO is working on a new strategic concept to be finished by the NATO summit meeting set for November in Lisbon. It will be the first reworking of NATO’s guiding strategy since 1999, and is meant to reinforce its core mission and goals, particularly the idea of collective defense. The strategy must also take into account new challenges from terrorism, online attacks, nuclear proliferation and enhanced missile threats and NATO’s experience in fighting wars, in Serbia and Kosovo and Afghanistan. The recommendations have already been provided to separate working groups on both NATO and the European Union. Former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright is chairwoman of an expert group that has been working to draft a new strategic concept for Mr. Rasmussen, who will make proposals to member governments for consultation. The jam, which is a concept of Internet exchanges pioneered in 2001, is a separate effort to aid those deliberations. At the same time, a former Spanish prime minister, Felipe González, is working on a report examining the European Union in 2020. The Europeans are developing their own diplomatic and military capacity alongside NATO’s, and how they work together is a delicate and crucial topic. The so-called jam focused on the ways that NATO and the European Union might work together more efficiently for collective security in a more complicated, post-cold-war world. Among the senior officials who led the online conversations were Adm. James Stavridis , the supreme allied commander in Europe; Jaap de Hoop Scheffer , former NATO secretary general; Gen. Hakan Syren , chairman of the European Union Military Committee; Anne-Marie Slaughter , director of policy planning in the United States State Department; Marc Perrin de Brichambaut , secretary general of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe ; and Dmitri Trenin , director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Moscow Center. The recommendations, which were picked out of the discussions by the organizers, included a more serious effort by NATO to reach beyond its military constituencies to the larger voting public, like through the creation of a civilian branch to cooperate with civilian actors like nongovernmental organizations. Another recommendation was to coordinate better on how to promote “human security,” from better governance to combating corruption and the protection of civilian populations and refugees in a battle or continuing conflict. Another, indirectly aimed at Russia, proposes that NATO and the European Union develop mutual assistance agreements with nonmembers in the case of environmental disasters or large-scale terrorist attacks. There is also a proposal for a European Intelligence Agency to better coordinate individual national intelligence on looming or hybrid issues like environmental threats, energy security and cybersecurity. It could also support specifically European Union military operations. Other ideas include the creation of a European Security Academy for European Union military and civilian staff members, improved public diplomacy to reduce the distance many Europeans feel from the union’s institutions, a European inventory of scarce natural resources with a mandate to protect them and an international crisis preparatory fund, which might collect 5 percent of donations made to any particular crisis for longer-term preparations. Robert E. Hunter , a former American ambassador to NATO and a senior adviser at RAND, praised the security jam for doing “something that NATO’s group of experts has not: to reach beyond the ‘usual suspects,’ to people who have truly original ideas and a range of analysis.” The online jam was organized by an independent research institute in Brussels, Security & Defense Agenda, in coalition with other similar institutions like Chatham House, the Atlantic Council of the United States , the Open Society Institute, the Foundation pour la Recherche Stratégique, Carnegie Europe and the Bertelsmann Stiftung . The project was done in collaboration with IBM and was also supported by the governments of the United States, France and Sweden, as well as by Thales, a major aerospace and defense company, and the American giant UTC (United Technologies), which owns Pratt & Whitney, the aviation powerhouse. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/world/europe/06nato.html
